REUNIONS 2006

Arun Alagappan was born in Bangkok, Thailand, where his father worked at the Asian Headquarters of the United Nations. At age 2, Arun and his family moved to New York City and have lived there since. Both of Arun’s parents and his extended family are originally from Chennai (Madras), South India.

Arun is a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton’s Class of 1981. He majored in Philosophy and won the Senior Thesis Prize in Ethics in his department, was awarded a Certificate of Proficiency in the History and Philosophy of Science, and was presented with an award for achieving the highest comprehensive examination score in his major.  He also served as the Director of the Jamesburg Correctional Institute for Boys Tutorial Program and on the Board of Directors of the Student Volunteers Council, the largest community service organization at Princeton. 

Arun went on to graduate from Harvard Law School where he served on the Board of Editors of the Harvard International Law Journal. At Harvard, Arun contributed his time to numerous public service organizations, including the United States Committee for UNICEF.  Following his graduation from law school, Arun worked briefly at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City and then served for a year as a Federal Law Clerk to The Honorable Judge Nelson of The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

Arun’s teaching experience includes tutoring standardized tests such as the SAT, the SAT Subject Tests, the LSAT, the GMAT, the GRE and the MCAT; he also worked as a Teaching Fellow in the Mathematics Department of Harvard College and as an instructor at a learning disabilities center in New York City.  At Harvard, the Dean of the College awarded Arun a Certificate of Distinction for Outstanding Teaching of Harvard Undergraduates.  He has tutored more than three thousand students privately in standardized tests and academic subjects including Biology, Chemistry, Physics, History, English, Mathematics, French, and Spanish.

In 1986, Arun founded Advantage Testing, Inc. and has been serving as its President since. Advantage Testing is a wide-ranging academic tutorial, test preparation, and educational counseling service for individuals of all ages.  The organization specializes in preparing students for standardized tests such as the SAT, the SAT Subject Tests, and the graduate and professional school entrance exams.  This past year, Advantage Testing enrolled more than two thousand students in the New York City area and more than three thousand students nationwide. Much of the philosophy of Advantage Testing is inspired by Princeton's commitment to one on one faculty-student instruction and the time-honored Asian devotion to education and respect for books. Six of Advantage Testing’s fourteen directors are Asian American and five are Princeton graduates.

While committed to providing the finest private tutoring in the nation, Advantage Testing has also been dedicated to making its educational services accessible to students of every background.  For twenty years, Advantage Testing has offered generous financial aid packages to students with demonstrable need, donated money and tutoring services to charity benefits and school scholarship funds, and provided pro bono instructional help to a variety of individuals and public service organizations such as Young Women’s Leadership School and Prep for Prep. Recently, Advantage Testing endowed the Princeton University Preparatory Program (PUPP) Academic Enrichment Fund. PUPP supports high-achieving, low-income students from Ewing, Princeton, and Trenton public high schools. Arun also serves on the Board of Trustees of Prep for Prep and as Vice President of the Board of Trustees of LEDA (Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America), a non-profit organization committed to nurturing the leadership potential of exceptional public school students of socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds that are underrepresented at selective colleges and universities. LEDA's inaugural National Scholars Program was held on the Princeton campus in the summer of 2005. President Shirley Tilghman is also an active LEDA Board member.

In 2004, Arun established with his siblings the million-dollar Visalakshi Alagappan Scholarship Fund in honor of his mother to benefit needy scholarship students worldwide and under-resourced schools in rural India. Advantage Testing has also actively contributed to Emergency Medicine (EM) in Asia by establishing a series of grants for research into the use and development of indigenous resources to care for acutely ill patients. Since 2002, Advantage Testing has supported young physician researchers at the annual International EM conferences held in India. Some of the research projects supported by Advantage Testing have led to new ideas and procedures that have been adopted in many Asian countries and are now promoted by the American College of Emergency Physicians.  This week, Arun is being recognized by New York magazine as one of its “most influential people in Education.”

Arun is married to Francine who is a native New Yorker. They have three children (Visala, 11; Serena, 8; and Kaya, 6) all of whom attend Trinity School in New York. The family enjoys racket sports including tennis and ping pong. Arun is a rated tournament ping pong player.
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Eva was born in New York City in 1954, the first of four children born to parents who immigrated to the US in the late 40’s.  Growing up speaking only Chinese, she learned English by watching and mimicking Walter Cronkite, Captain Kangaroo and Shari Lewis on pre-Sesame Street television.  When she expressed a desire to apply to Princeton after a chance visit to the Princeton campus in 3rd grade, her mother solemnly informed her that “There are things that are not fair in the world, and this is one of them:  You will not be able to attend Princeton University because you are a girl.”  Years later, in her junior year of high school, she heard the miraculous news on the radio:  Princeton was accepting women!

“I have been blessed with good fortune all my life.  First, I was born in America.  Despite financially challenging times in my younger years, my parents’ hard work and sacrifices made it possible for them to send all four of their children to college and post-graduate schools here.  I grew up in a modest suburb of New York City where I had the freedom to attend school, study piano and read whatever I wanted, while my first cousins and their parents in China were suffering badly during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960’s.  That Princeton would begin accepting “co-eds” in 1970, just in time for me to apply the following year was just unbelievable.  It made me feel like nothing was impossible in America.”

At Princeton, Eva was elected President of her Class during her sophomore year and President of Campus Club her senior year.  She co-founded the Princeton University Jazz Ensemble and conducted the group at its first concert on Alumni Day in Jadwin Gym in February of 1973.  An Economics major, she concentrated on courses in the Engineering School related to transportation and public policy and graduated in 1976 with a degree in Economics.  She received her master’s degree from MIT in Civil Engineering-Transportation Systems in 1978.

“Princeton was everything I dreamed it would be—and so much more!  However, something totally unexpected happened to me late in my freshman year having to do with being Asian.   I had been one of only two Asians in my public high school in northern New Jersey, and there were more than thirty Asians on campus at Princeton, so I was hoping to finally get a better sense of my Asian identity.  I enjoyed a wonderful first semester taking seminars in Asian American literature (I never knew any existed!) and attending many wonderful events organized by the older Asians on campus.  After my election to president of my class, however, I was surprised to find that many of my Asian friends felt I had “abandoned” them by running for office at all.  Several of them mentioned quietly that they felt I had become a “banana”--yellow on the outside, white on the inside.  I remained confused about this for many years after I graduated.”

Eva married another Princeton graduate, Art Horowitz ’75 (now Art Lerner-Lam) and joined him in San Diego after receiving her degree from MIT to begin her career in transportation systems policy, planning and operations.  Starting as an associate planner, she was promoted quickly and became Director of Planning and Operations for the San Diego Metropolitan Transit Development Board.  There, she helped the agency to plan and open the first light rail transit system in the United States since World War II.  Active in the local Princeton Club of San Diego, she eventually became its President.  Returning to the East Coast in the mid-80s, Eva served as a Term Trustee on the Princeton Board of Trustees from 1984-88.

“As a trustee, one of the first tasks assigned to me was to explore the issue of Asian-American admissions with students, alumni, faculty and the administration.  The admission rate for Asians was significantly lower than that for the general applicant pool, and the Princeton Asian community was concerned about reverse-discrimination.  Like most politically-charged issues, the matter was in fact more complicated than it appeared.  We learned that although many of the Asian-American applicants were highly-qualified academically, their extra-curricular activities were often quite limited, giving the Admission Office little reason to admit them, given the highly-competitive pool of “well-rounded” applicants.  Upon further investigation, we discovered that there was good reason for the limited amount of participation in team sports, debate teams, music groups, etc.:  Most of the Asian-American applicants at the time were first generation, and supporting their parents, aunts and uncles and other siblings by working after school in their family businesses (restaurants and laundries, mostly).  Between preparing dinner and tutoring their siblings and folding laundry in Chinatown, it was a wonder they achieved the academic standings that they did at places like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science.  It was clear that somehow, the backgrounds of these “disadvantaged” Asian students needed to be highlighted on their applications.  That’s why we started a group of alumni interviewers focused on interviewing disadvantaged Asians at their homes—so we could give the Admission Office an idea of what the applicants themselves were often embarrassed to admit on a written application form.”

After serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the New Jersey Transit Corporation (she was appointed by-then Governor Thomas Kean ’59), Eva founded the Palisades Consulting Group, Inc.  The firm specializes in integrated applications of advanced technology systems for public transit, but Eva’s interest in her Chinese roots also brought her China in 1992 as a consultant to Sir Gordon S. Wu ’56, who was building China’s first high-speed expressway, known as the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway.  She has since been a consultant to The World Bank, the Economist Conferences, the China Ministry of Communications and the Beijing Highway Bureau.  In 1988, Eva was presented with the Asian American Association of Princeton’s Outstanding Achievement Award and in 1997, she became the President of the Princeton Alumni Association of Beijing (Virtual), organizing the Alumni Council’s first “virtual” regional alumni association, consisting not only of alumni who reside in Beijing, but all those whose business--or hearts--have an association with the Chinese capital. 

“It was a complete surprise, and a great honor to have been presented with an award from the Asian-American Association of Princeton after my service as a member of the Board of Trustees.  I felt I had somehow stumbled my way to acceptance by the Asian-American community.  It meant a lot to me then, and it still does now.”

Eva recently moved to Beijing, after she and Art decided that she should follow and support their youngest of three children, 14-year-old Katie, in her desire to study four years of high school in a Chinese public high school.  Elected as President of the Transportation and Development Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2005, she is organizing the 138,000+ member Society’s First International Symposium on Sustainable and Productive Transportation and Development in Beijing, January 2008, in anticipation of the Beijing 2008 Olympics from her new vantage point in China’s capital city.

“There is a natural chemistry between Princeton and today’s China.  I can feel it in the interviews I conduct for the Beijing Schools Committee and in the conversations I have with Chinese researchers and businesspeople who attend our PAA Beijing informal dinners.  The intellectual exuberance of the people in China, finally emerging from over a century and a half of foreign occupation and decades of subsequent social upheaval and deprivation, is a perfect match for Princeton’s academic excellence, and we’re poised to see some truly significant and meaningful interactions between the university and its counterparts in China, not to mention among its many students, faculty and alumni.  It is going to be a very exciting century!”

A member of the class of ’61, Franklin Odo was born and reared in Honolulu, Hawai’i.  While at Princeton, he was on the fencing team and in the Ivy Club.  He recalls being among a very few non-white undergraduates in an all-male class totalling just over 720 students.  Among his memorable trips were a spring break in Savannah, GA, where Franklin got the first hand opportunity to observe Black-White race relations in a new light, and a summer stay with a local family in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, where he watched Italian American youth exploring their cultural roots, and began to wonder about his own family ties to Asia.

Franklin majored in history at Princeton, and subsequently went to Harvard for an MA in East Asia Regional Studies.  He returned to Princeton for a Ph.D. in Japanese history in 1975. His first teaching job was at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1968 but he was soon engaged in anti-war protest and civil rights activities. This experience with activism led to an epiphany, and inspired a new academic trajectory which began with serving as the first curriculum coordinator for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.  Professor Odo became one of the first faculty members in the country who pioneer in the new field of Asian American Studies, and never looked back.  He taught at California State University - Long Beach, before returning as the first permanent director of the Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1978.

In 1994, Franklin began a series of visiting professor stints – at University of Pennsylvania, Hunter College, and Columbia University.  Professor Odo taught one seminar in American Studies at Princeton in the spring of 1996, during which period a coalition of student activists occupied Nassau Hall, demanding that Latina/o American and Asian American studies also be made available as official university curricula.  In 1997, he became the first Director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institution, and continues to advocate for better representation of Asian Pacific American culture and history among its 19 museums, and numerous other units.

No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai’i during WWII, Franklin Odo‘s most recent work on Japanese Americans in WWII Hawaii was published by Temple University Press in 2004; he also edited the Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience, published by Columbia University Press in 2002.

The Asian Pacific American (APA) Program is the key unit within the Smithsonian assisting 18 museums and other agencies in incorporating APA artifacts, programs, research, and outreach. At the same time, it serves as the major portal through which the dozens of APA communities access the Smithsonian. In previous years, the APA Program has brought to the Smithsonian, exhibits focusing on Chinese Americans, Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans.

This will be his first attendance at a Princeton reunion. 
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Born in the Staten Island borough of New York City, Sue Suh spent her first year sharing a small apartment with her parents who had recently emigrated from South Korea.  From the beginning, her parents laugh to this day, Sue was on the go:

“My parents love to tell stories of how, before I was one year old, I would determinedly grip the side of my crib and jump up and down.  I jumped incessantly, like I was the next alternative fuel source for Staten Island.  We did not have carpeted floors so I caused quite a racket for our downstairs neighbors, and Mom and Dad eventually had to move us to a little house on Long Island.  I guess you could say that I have always been very excited about the world, and did not want to be kept in a box.”

At Princeton, where Sue graduated in 1996 with a degree in Politics, she was co-president of her senior class, a Butler College Residential Adviser, and a member of the track team and the Cap & Gown eating club.  During the summers she was a Princeton Project 55 intern at a northern Kentucky social service organization, and also interned at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations during the UN’s 50th anniversary.  Sue wrote an award-winning senior thesis on French nuclear testing policy, and received several other University awards for her leadership and involvement in the Princeton community – including the W. Sanderson Detwiler 1903 Prize and the “Spirit of Princeton” award.

“Princeton provided remarkable opportunities to grow, learn, have fun, take lots of risks, make lots of mistakes, and grow some more.  I was simultaneously humbled and energized by the people around me every day.  It was a great honor representing my classmates, whom I thought the world of.  They were truly passionate about everything from the latest intricate mathematical formula to the struggle for democracy in the post-Soviet Newly Independent States to our men’s basketball team toppling defending champion

After graduation from Princeton, Sue spent a year in South Korea on a J. William Fulbright Scholarship to teach English and American culture at a boys’ high school and pursue research on the Korean educational system.  It was her first time in Korea by herself, without Mom and Dad to help translate or get around town, and it was definitely daunting at first.

“I did not immediately ‘fit in’ by myself in Korea and was eager to ‘catch up’ on the culture of my generation.  I grew closer to relatives I had not seen in years and also traveled around the country hiking up legendary mountains and around ancient historical sites to soak up as much of Korea as I could.  I was honored to achieve a black belt in taekwondo, the Korean national sport, training with some of the most disciplined yet kind athletes I had ever met.  And I realized again that ‘not fitting in’ could also be a good thing.  After classes I played soccer with my high school boys, who in 1997 were still not used to seeing girls on the same playing field – literally and figuratively.  It was a rewarding and eye-opening twelve months.”

Sue returned to New Jersey as Program Manager for the Princeton Project 55 Center for Civic Leadership, where she helped connect students and recent graduates with nonprofit summer internships and year-long fellowships around the country, like the one she had experienced as an undergraduate.  She also supported PP55’s efforts to bridge the University and local communities through experiential learning initiatives.  Sue then joined the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, helping to organize a photography exhibition, accompanying book, and public education campaign on solving homelessness that brought together leaders from the arts, government, business, and advocacy arenas. 

In 2001, Sue received a Master’s degree in Political Science from Columbia University, and followed her love of international affairs to the U.S. State Department that fall as a Presidential Management Fellow.  She began in the Department’s arms control and international security offices, focusing on multilateral concerns.  The following year she served on detail to the Pentagon where she supported negotiations on the Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions, in which the United States and the Russian Federation pledged to cut their respective nuclear arsenals.  Sue then returned to the State Department to be a special assistant to the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, the Department’s number three official, before joining the U.S. Mission to the UN (the same place she interned as a Princeton junior and senior) in May 2004.  From January-April of 2005, Sue served on special assignment to the U.S. Liaison Office in Libya, joining a growing wave of American officials tasked with rebuilding diplomatic relations after a quarter-century absence. 

“Libya was a wonderful experience in countless ways.  The people are sincerely welcoming and the land itself spectacular, with vast desert treasures and nearly untouched Roman ruins.  Being Asian added another dimension, as passers-by would wonder where I came from.  After guessing through every Asian country they could think of, I would announce that I was from the United States, which always took them by surprise.  After we all giggled, the conversation served as a great segue into the positive values and diverse opportunities that America stands for – that you can be a U.S. citizen with any skin color, religion, language and culture.  There is no one ‘box’ into which you must fit.”

Currently Sue is back at USUN working in the Sanctions Unit, focusing on Africa and counterterrorism issues.  She continues to devote much of her spare time to the nonprofit world and community development, and has served on the State Board of Directors for Special Olympics New Jersey, on the National Selection Committee for the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation, in numerous Princeton alumni organizations, and as a volunteer for a range of charitable causes.  For her dedication to government and public service, she was inducted into the Lawrence High School Hall of Honor in 2002.

Sue lives in Manhattan with her husband, Chad Livingston, and over the years has also worked as a rock climbing instructor and portrait photographer.  She enjoys hiking, playing the guitar, and travelling, and recently ran in the New York City Marathon.

“The New York City Marathon begins on Staten Island, where I was born.  It was a special feeling, warming up there at the start.  The strength and love of my family is a constant inspiration.  Our parents taught us the precious value of hard work, integrity, and caring for others, and they sacrificed everything for my brother Albert (Princeton ’02) and me.  While Mom and Dad may have come to the United States with very little in their pockets, in their hearts there was no dream too big for us to dream.  Attending Princeton was a dream come true for me, and the University’s motto of ‘in the Nation’s Service and in the Service of All Nations’ is one that resonates deeply, challenging me each day to ‘think outside the box’…to create opportunities for others to reach above and beyond.”

With almost 10 years of professional experience in Europe, Asia and the United States, Rika brings to Shvo an international breadth and depth of experience, having executed various marketing communications responsibilities with tier-one multinational companies.

As Director of Marketing with Shvo, Rika is managing a team of marketing professionals, focusing on bringing breakthrough branded thinking and partnership to the luxury real estate arena. 

Prior to Shvo, Rika spent 4 years executing strategic initiatives within the marketing group at Accenture, specializing in global marketing strategy for Accenture's Communications, High Tech and Media & Entertainment clients. Previous to Accenture, Rika cultivated her skills and business insight with experience in the field of strategic alliance marketing and marketing consulting with Sony and chinadotcom respectively.
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